Operational Efficiency is the Key to Safety Intelligence.

Are you a quality, safety, audit or risk manager? Do you recognise any of these headaches?

• You need to go looking in three or four different places to get information.
• There are often references and sign-posts, but not the actual information, so you end up following a paper trail.
• The same information can be stored in different places with minor variations and the overall picture is fuzzy and liable to misinterpretation.
• This can lead to wasting time, missing opportunities to do something important, low performance and risk.
• Sometimes you can’t get the information you need to complete a task: wasted opportunities.
• Sometimes you misinterpret and go ahead at risk.

In the aviation industry, airlines, MRO’s and regulators themselves must ensure that scattered information collated from multiple scheduling, reporting, compliance, security, safety and maintenance systems are monitored and managed effectively. This is often achieved through laborious administrative processes that, in a highly regulated and pressurised industry such as aviation or rail, can be stressful, slow and very inefficient.

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The consolidation, surfacing and visibility of this information is called ‘safety intelligence’ in the aviation business and the systems from which the real or near-time intelligence needs to be drawn include flight planning, crewing and rostering, flight data management, training and competence, safety reporting and engineering systems.
Poor safety intelligence has severe implications, including:

• Regulatory non-compliance and exposure
• Safety failures
• Incidents
• Poor operational performance
• Financial losses
• Reputational damage

While pressure on the aviation industry increases every year, the demand for air travel is driving expansion in the commercial fleet by 2025. There are also more regulations, more audits and more requirements for data sharing and analysis while shortages of trained and available staff at every level – as well as shortages of regulatory staff – pose further issues as does a risk-based oversight.
The leading airlines and MRO’s are turning to a new generation of enterprise risk management solutions to transform and modernise business practices, deliver efficiencies and provide a single, consolidated view of every aspect and detail of emerging risk in their operations. These solutions help organisations achieve:

• Better operational decision making and better operating performance
• More effective and cost beneficial resource management
• Mitigated risks and lower costs
• Streamlined administration processes and an end to silos
• Better strategic insight, better strategic decisions, better strategy
• Optimised strategic capital investments
• Stronger reputation and brand, internally and externally

These insights, while expressed in the language and needs of aviation, are relevant across all industries and for any business or professional manager who seeks to achieve operational excellence, comply with regulations and standards and anticipate problems and prepare for the unexpected.
For further information on operational efficiency, have a read at Ideagen’s white paper ‘Efficiency is the Key to Safety Intelligence’. This white paper was written to give aviation professionals an insight into what can be done to achieve operational excellence, high performance and safety intelligence.



About the Author
Gordon McKeown is a software marketing professional with twenty years’ experience in the industry. As Product Evangelist at Ideagen, Gordon’s job is to understand the needs of customers and markets, to drive Ideagen’s products and corporate brands and contribute to its product strategy.